Saturday, October 4, 2014

‘Biden tries to distance US from the mess in the Mideast’

Vice President Joe Biden, by blaming Washington’s allies for the
spread of IS in Iraq and Syria, attempted to distance the US from the
mess that is emerging in the Middle East, former MI5 agent Annie Machon
told RT.

Addressing students at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the
Institute of Politics at Harvard University, Joe Biden accused Turkey and the Gulf States of being
unscrupulous in their pursuit of ousting President Assad and, in
doing so, funding terrorists for the cause.

RT:Why do you think Joe Biden's chosen to
turn on his allies now?

Annie Machon: I think there is very much an
element of trying to distance America from the mess that is
emerging in the Middle East. I’m astonished in fact that he
actually told the truth about what some of its allied countries
are doing in the Middle East. But of what I’m more astonished is
of his apparent amnesia about what America and Britain were
trying to ferment in Syria only a year ago. They were not only
putting staff intelligence personnel on the ground, and providing
logistical support to the rebels in Syria; they were spearheading
the campaign to try to oust Assad. Assad was one of the few
remaining dictators from the regional “axis of evil.”

They’ve already got rid of Gaddafi and Hussein, they’ve backed
off Iran and they certainly backed off North Korea now they have
nukes. But Assad seemed to be fair game, and was a sitting duck
as well because Russia at that time was trying to build a new
energy pipeline which would go through Syria and provide the
Russians with the Mediterranean base to get the energy from Iran
through to Europe.So it was very much in America’s and Britain’s
interest to try to destabilize Syria by trying to take out Assad
and by providing support to these rebel groups many of whom then
did evolve into these more extremist groups.

Only last year our governments were still talking about aiding
these groups, even Al-Nusra which has been taken over by Al-Qaeda
extremists, which were frightening even for some of the regional
Al-Qaeda people. They were desperate to get rid of Assad in order
to thwart Russian interests in that region.

An Islamic State militant (L) stands next to residents as they hold
pieces of wreckage from a Syrian war plane after it crashed in Raqqa, in
northeast Syria September 16, 2014. (Reuters/Stringer)

RT:How do you think Joe Biden's swipe at
America's allies will affect relations with them?

AM: A very good question. It’s interesting that
he has raised the fact that Saudi Arabia is involved in funding
some of these groups. But I think America is really taking a risk
here because they are such key allies in the Middle East, Saudi
Arabia, for them to attack them and to try to undermine
credibility of what Saudi Arabia has been doing in the region,
not just in the region but by funding Wahhabi schools across
Europe and across America as well to spread this radical version
of Islam, it’s quite frankly astonishing.

RT:The US Vice President also said "there's
no moderate middle" among Syria's fighters but America still
insists on funding and arming the rebels. Is this a recognition,
or signs of an emerging split in the White House?

AM: Perhaps, the Vice President is finally
learning some lessons from history. It does not matter who you
think your friends are going to be in the region. Very often they
will be taken over or subsumed into a more radical group. And we
have seen this time and time again. This is what keeps creating
these new threats across the Middle East. So perhaps there is a
split and perhaps he is from the more moderate fraction as
opposed to the neo-con hawks that Obama has sought to appease
over so many years with only different interventions across the
Middle East.

RT:US intelligence is among the most
powerful in the world. How is it possible that they overlooked
their allies funding jihadists? President Obama has also blamed
the intelligence services for failing to notice the emerging
danger of ISIS. He's been Commander-in-Chief for nearly six
years. Is it entirely their fault?

AM: Well, he seems to drop the ball regularly. I
mean they didn’t pick up only so-called hijackers before the 9/11
attacks either. They didn’t seem to have a very good feel for
what was going on in Libya when they were in the process of
toppling Colonel Gaddafi, and in the immediate aftermath when the
Embassy got shot at. So this shows us a systemic failure of the
intelligence that the US government is getting. And I would put
that down partly to the overreliance on dragnet and electronic
surveillance where it is very easy to miss all the needles in the
haystack. What they should go back to perhaps is more targeted
human intelligence sources on the ground that could really tell
them what it’s like on the ground, and they can provide proper
warnings to the people who need to make a policy about what they
are doing in the Middle East.

Quotes

"There is beauty in truth, even if it's painful. Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak. But lies only strengthen our defects. They don't teach us anything, help anything, fix anything or cure anything. Nor do they develop one's character, one's mind, one's heart or one's soul." Jose Harris

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